My three year old grandson, Ray, comes over to my house everyday, except on the weekends when he putters around his own seven acres with his Poppa. My two youngest kids are 4 and 5, so Ray has built-in playmates. He doesn’t remember life before they joined our family.

Since we are a very large family, Ray has a carload of cousins, but the majority of his aunts and uncles live at home with me, his grandmother.

I look around my house and I see all my traumatized children, I see and deal with their issues each day, calm the aggressions, referee the problems, and contend with the flare-ups. I have a sixth sense, a third eye, and an inner alarm system that keeps me on top of everything.

Ray’s mother, my only birth child, pointed out to me today that Ray doesn’t see the issues; he sees a bunch of fun, cool kids, The Bubbas (my twelve youngest sons) and his best friend, Tabby. He sees older girls acting cool, and my older sons trying as well. He picks up their slang, surprising his Poppa at times with what comes out of his mouth at supper, he runs hard to keep up with the outdoor marathon games, and Ray holds his own in a family of aggressive and difficult children.

Maybe I should follow Ray’s lead, quit concentrating so hard on the issues, overlook the problems at times, and just enjoy the zaniness. The Bible suggests that we keep the innocence of a child, why should we grow so jaded or hyper-alert that we miss the daily fun?

These children are simply fun to Ray.

I have other grandchildren as well, all growing up calmly with their emotionally healed parents. They come over to my house constantly, they see the skirmishes that occur, the yelling and the melt-downs, but they remain unperturbed, almost as if, “well that’s life at Bita’s house.” Bita is short for Abuelita, my older grandkids pronounce it correctly, my oldest granddaughter, born when I was 40, immediately assigned me the name and I adore it.

I think all of my grandchildren are fortunate to have so many aunts, uncles and cousins. Even my angriest kids are calm and loving to the grandbabies, over-protective and sweet, sometimes just staring at the babies as if they are a strange, alien species; a genus that did not go through foster care, that was kept safe, well-fed and nurtured. I can sometimes literally see the dawning of the new understanding of proper parenting wash over my own children’s faces as they hold these next generation children.

Of course it rarely occurs to them that I am properly parenting them, that kind of knowledge comes slower and later.